Conventionally, sanitary napkins and disposable diapers have been used as absorbent articles. Pet sheets, which are included in the same category, are also widely used as a toilet for pets.
A liquid-permeable top sheet is provided in the portions of such absorbent articles that come into contact with the user's skin or the like. Furthermore, recently, high liquid draining performance has been demanded for top sheets from the viewpoint of reducing the sense of stickiness to skin for example, and bulky non-woven fabric is considered to be favorable as such a material.
Such non-woven fabric is manufactured in a strip-shape using an appropriate method such as carding, and then wound into a roll and stored in the form of a non-woven fabric whole cloth. When the time to be used arrives, the non-woven fabric whole cloth is carried to the absorbent article manufacturing line, and the non-woven fabric is fed from the whole cloth in the line and used as the top sheet material.
When non-woven fabric is wound into a non-woven fabric whole cloth, tension is applied in the winding direction during winding to prevent the non-woven fabric from zigzagging or the like. For this reason, non-woven fabric is normally wound tightly due to this tension. Specifically, the non-woven fabric is compressed in the thickness direction and has reduced bulk. Accordingly, when the non-woven fabric is fed from the non-woven fabric whole cloth in the absorbent article manufacturing line, only the non-woven fabric having reduced bulk is fed and supplied, and thus it is not possible to meet the aforementioned demand for bulky non-woven fabric.
To address this problem, Patent Document 1 discloses a technique in which a bulk restoring device is installed upstream in the absorbent article manufacturing line. Specifically, it is disclosed that non-woven fabric fed from a non-woven fabric whole cloth is heated by hot air being blown thereon with a bulk restoring device when the non-woven fabric passes through a predetermined conveying route, and thus the bulk of the non-woven fabric is restored. It is also disclosed that the non-woven fabric after the aforementioned heating is sent as-is to the next processing device in the manufacturing line, without being wound again.